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Forum on Public Policy

Dominican-American Writers: Hybridity and AmbivalenceFernando Valerio-Holgun, Associate Professor of Spanish, Colorado State University

AbstractUS-Dominican writers are not newcomers in American literary scene. Many of these writers were born in the US orimmigrated as children with their families, but all share the fact of writing in English and publishing in the US, afact that has disrupted the traditional literary cannon of this country. In the words of Cuban-American literary criticGustavo Prez-Firmat, they have come to form a hyphenated cultural identity.

The importance of the Dominican presence in New York manifests itself in literature, which has functionedas a venue for reflecting, in one way or another, on the Dominican or Dominican-American cultural identity. One ofthe main purposes of this article will be to analyze the representation that Dominican writers in the US make of theirculture of origin, and of their adopted country.

Introduction

Dominican immigration to the United States, and more specifically to New York City,

should be considered within the context of the peripheral migration towards the hegemonic

centers of the so-called First World. According to Iain Chambers, migration, set in motion by

modernization and the economic globalization, is currently reaching a magnitude and an

intensity never before seen (1994, 5-6). The citizens of the Dominican Republic make up the

fourth largest group of immigrants to the United States after Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and

Cubans. In New York City, Dominicans constitute the second most-important group of Latinos

after Puerto Ricans. Dominican immigration is relatively recent, compared to that of Puerto

Ricans and Cubans.1The importance of Dominican immigration to the United States has mainly

appeared in Dominican-American literature, where in one manner or another, the Dominican

and/or Dominican-American cultural identity is represented. One of the objectives of this article

is to analyze the hybridity of Dominican-American writers and the representations they construct

from the cultures of their native and adopted countries. I propose as well that these writers have

1After the death of the dictator Rafael Lenidas Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961, andthe American invasion of 1965, Dominicans began to immigrate to New York. This migration grew during the1980s and 90s after the severe economic crises that afflicted the country. According to the census of 1997, thenumber of Dominicans in New York had reached 832,000, or ten percent of the population of the DominicanRepublic. Of that total, nearly 500,000 live in New York City.

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appropriated the hegemonic discourse that primitivizes the Other as a way of combating the

anxiety, angst, and fear produced by hybridity. In this way, Dominican-American writers achieve

recognition from the hegemonic subject and go on to form part of the American literary canon. I

will concentrate on the novels How the Garca Sisters Lost Their Accents and Yo! by Julia

lvarez, Soledad by Angie Cruz and the collection of short stories Drown by Junot Daz.

The Immigrant Subject: Hybridity, Third Space, and the Screenplay Culture

Migration in the context of modernization and economic globalization has created a

hybrid space among the diverse cultures coming into contact. According to Homi Bhabha,hybridity is a new cultural and a privileged third space. The hybrid can be considered as that

which is neither the one nor the other (1988, 10). In the case of hybrid US/Dominican writers,

Julia lvarez and Junot Daz were brought to the United States as children. Angie Cruz, on the

other hand, was born in the United States of Dominican parents and was raised in Washington

Heights, New York. With respect to the first two, the Cuban sociologist Rubn Rambaut calls

this type of immigrant the One-and-a-Half Generation, since not only have they had to struggle

with the transition from childhood to adulthood, but also from one sociocultural environment to

another. (Prez-Firmat, 1994, 4). Gustavo Prez-Firmat considers that, more than adult

immigrants who seek to reaffirm themselves by identification with their original culture through

time, or the first generation which completely assimilates to the host countrys culture,

Generation 1.5 is the one capable of negotiating both cultures and shape what he calls a

hyphenated culture. Prez-Firmat concurs with Bhabha in that the hybrid, by being neither the

one nor the other can negotiate more easily between both cultures. These immigrant subjects

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have had to articulate cultural differences as a process of integration/resistance throughout its

encounters with the Other (Hall, 1996, 141).

In the work of Homi Bhabha and Gustavo Prez-Firmat one notes a celebratory attitude

toward the hybrid. I believe, however, that there persists within the hybrid a heartbreaking

ambivalence, often expressed as love/hate and manifested in the binary oppositions here/now and

there/then proposed by Abril Trigo. (2000, 279). In the novelsHow the Garcia Sisters Lost Their

Accents, Yo!, Soledad and in the short story collection Drown, the characters express an

ambivalent relationship with Dominican culture: the desire to return to get to know the country

and the depreciation of that same culture, which is, then, represented through a dirty realism asthe primitivization and abjection of the subaltern Other.2 Some characters return to the

Dominican Republic as postcolonial tourists and then transform the here/now into a there/now,

because if they truly have exchanged time, they speak from the hegemonic space.3This negative

representation, on the part of the hybrid, is, if you will, a response to the massive immigration,

perceived as an invasion, by citizens of the developing countries to the developed ones. In this

manner, the -which the hybrid does not recognize in himself- is despised as a ghost of the

colonized Other. The Other is symbolically consumed by the hegemonic subject and the hybrid

by means of literature which represents them as abject and primitive -although often rare, exotic

beings- as a form of expelling the negative terms of the civilization-barbarism dichotomy from

their unconscious. It is the regression of the unconscious.

2Dirty realism designates the tendency in American literature which came arose in the 1980s and is characterizedby sordid, abject characters that live in a world of crime and in a depersonalized society. Some of the writersassociated with this tendency are Raymond Carver, Jayne Anne Phillips and Richard Ford (Macey, 99-100). JunotDaz appropriates this discourse in his representation of the Dominican as Other.3Jaume Mart-Olivella reappropriates the concept of the postcolonial subject for the construction of hispostcolonial tourist as a reconsideration of neocolonial relations through tourism. The gaze of the postcolonialtourist is the hegemonic gaze of the European and the American. The hegemonic gaze of Yo, Yunior, Soledad andother characters, as narrative masks for their authors, is the gaze of a postcolonial tourist.

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Images of the Other-Within and the Ghost of the Other

In Soledad by Angie Cruz, Soledad, the main character, is torn between her desire to

assimilate to Anglo culture and her rejection of Dominican culture which nonetheless, maintains

a strong hold on her, through ties to her family and principally to her mother. Soledad gets a job

in an art gallery and moves to an Anglo neighborhood (called Gringolandia by another

character), but she is quickly obliged to return home, manipulated by her mothers illness.

Soledad, nicknamed blanquita, a sellout, a wannabe white girl (Cruz, 2001, 12-13) transfers

her quarrel with Dominican culture to her mother, whom she hates (and loves) and about whosedeath she fantasizes. Her cousin Flaca mocks her saying, Classy Soledad is working at a

galera. Do you have to wear a suit? (Ibid., 41). Soledad does not know her father because her

mother had been a prostitute in Puerto Plata, trying to escape poverty in the countryside near San

Pedro, both towns in the Dominican Republic. A series of negative images and expressions

concerning the Dominican Republic appear throughout the novel. Dominicans who live in

Washington Heights are compared with cockroaches: Gorda jokes that if someone invented a

Raid for Dominicans the government would fumigate all of Washington Heights. (Ibid., 97).

The Dominican Republic is represented by the narrator through a series of stereotyped images in

English and Spanish, such as Home, rice and beans, apagones, pltanos, mango trees, da de los

muertos, strikes, warm beach water, malecn, never having an election that doesnt get recounted

home. . . (Ibid., 229).

InHow the Garcia Sisters Lost Their Accentsby Julia lvarez, the Dominican Republic

is also represented in negative terms, as a country populated solely by submissive servants,

lower-class mulattos, and a governing elite under the eternal oppression of a capricious tyrant.

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Above all is apparent an implicit criticism of the submission and the traditional role of women in

the face of machista patriarchal culture. The oppositions superior/inferior,

democratic/authoritarian, developed/backward, liberal/dictatorial, therefore, correspond to the

United States/Dominican Republic dichotomy. In Yo!, her third novel, the chapter The

Wedding Guests is one of the most interesting in terms of the representation of Dominican

culture in contrast with Anglo culture. First, in the section corresponding to Doug, one of the

characters, the shape of the map of the Dominican Republic is compared with that of an amoeba

under a microscope. Next, the instruments of the merengue campesino, interpreted by a perico

ripiao, are described as the crudest instruments, or in other words, rudimentary, primitiveinstruments. The same civilization/barbarism dichotomy, brought up in the first novel, reappears

when the priest witnesses an argument among wedding guests from a distance and assumes that

the problem had arisen among the guests and not among Yolandas tropical-island family. . .

surely they are used to conducting themselves civilly in much hotter weathers (lvarez, 1997,

236). The novel Yo! is full of stereotypes, negative images, and false conceptions about

Dominican culture. On various occasions superiority/inferiority oppositions overflow the

characters points of view and become part of the imaginary of a postcolonial tourist who, as an

omniscient narrator, seems to express the authors ideology.

The Primitivist Discourse: Appropriation and Projection

In her book Gone Primitive, Marianna Torgovnick defines primitivism as an ensemble of

diverse and contradictory tropes, which form a grammar and a vocabulary referring to the Other

(8). These tropes, which consist of recurring images and ideas, were crucial to the formation of

European cultural identity. By means of these tropes, Europeans constructed a vision of the

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Other as a way of struggling with cultural differences and at the same time as a justification for

the colonization of Asia, Africa, and the Americas (Root, 1996, 34). 4

In this way, some Dominican-American writers, through their personal narratives, have

appropriated the European primitivist discourse and have transferred it to the inhabitants of their

home country in order to construct them as the Primitive-Other. This appropriation takes place in

the context of a postcolonial imaginary and becomes a metaprimitivism -now that these writers

are part of the United States. Primitivism has its corollary in that which Torgovnick calls

projection: Primitives are our untamed selves, our id forces -libidinous, irrational, violent,

dangerous (8). From the binary oppositions good/bad, rational/irrational, civilized/savage,cultural/natural, some Dominican-American writers expel the second term from themselves and

project it onto the citizens of their country of origin, as a form of dealing with the fear and

anxiety produced by hybridity. In this way, they imaginarily construct themselves as that-which-

they-are-not, which is to say, as a hegemonic subject.

The same female character, named Primitiva, appears in Julia lvarezs novels How the

Garcia Sisters Lost Their Accents, Yo!andIn the Name of Salom. This character functions as a

metonomy of Dominicans and immediately refers back to the primitivist discourse which I

mentioned earlier.5 The Dominican Republic remains associated with Haiti, upon which

Dominicans in their turn have projected the European and American primitivist discourse.6 In

How the Garcia Sisters Lost Their Accents, there are two important characters pierced by the

Dominican-Haitian conflicts of race, social class, and cultural identity. The first of them is the

4Tropes are rhetorical figures which organize images, concepts and symbols. Paraphrasing Root, the notions ofsavage, cannibal, cretin, animal, decadent, inferior, lustful and violent are tropes of primitivism. Root alsodistinguishes between stereotypes and tropes. Unlike stereotypes, tropes can be ambivalent, contradictory and muchmore difficult to deconstruct.

5In the story The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars by Junot Daz, one of the characters is named Brbaro, whichalludes to the civilization/barbarism dichotomy.6See my essay Primitive Borders: Cultural Identity and Ethnic Cleansing in the Dominican Republic.

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maid who lives with the Garcia family in New York. Her name is Primitiva and as such, in order

to do honor to her name, occupies herself with some santera ceremonies, although perhaps the

narrator purposely meant to omit the word Vodun, which is a religion much more prevalent in

the Dominican Republic, in order to relate the word primitive with Haiti. In fact, it is never

said that the maid is Dominican but rather from the Island, which implies that she could be

Dominican or Haitian. The other character is Chucha, an elderly black Haitian woman. It is a

redundancy to say black and Haitian because as is well known, there are no blacks in the

Dominican Republic, because black is a synonym for Haitian. In the novel, Chucha is

described as a super wrinkled and Haitian blue-black, not Dominican caf-con-leche black.(lvarez, 1994a, 218). The color coffee-with-milk, as a translation of caf con leche, is used to

characterize Dominicans, although the only difference here is the placement of the word black

alongside the category of caf-con-leche. And this is so perhaps in order to contextualize these

differences within the racial polarization in the United States. Obviously, upon the mention of

Chuchas skin color and nationality, Dominican skin color and nationality had to follow closely,

in the same sentence. In the next sentence, the narrator continues, saying that Chucha was a real

Haitian and because of this, could not pronounce certain words like perejil. By real, the

narrator means that Chucha was born in Haiti and is not Dominican-Haitian or a Dominican of

Haitian parents. Chuchas name is tied to the religion of Vodun, because she made her living

doing readings. References to the black race and Haitian culture must be followed by

references to the antonyms civilization/barbarism. Laura, the girls mother, tells Chucha that she

must sleep in a bed like civilized people, not in a coffin as she had wanted, in keeping with her

religious beliefs. In this way, it would seem that seem that there exist levels of primitivism: if

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Dominicans are primitive in comparison with Anglos, Haitians are primitive in comparison with

Dominicans and Anglos.

The Abjection of the Other

In the stories of Junot Daz, the abjection of the Other, through that which has been called

dirty realism, constitutes a form of primitivization of the Other.7In Powers of Horrors, Julia

Kristeva uses the concept of abjection in order to analyze the individuals separation from and

his later identification with not only his mother but his nation as well. That which is abject is

expelled on the other side of the border. Abjection implies an ambivalence, since the body fromwhich the individual tries to separate himself is loved and hated at the same time. This

ambivalence has to do with what Freud called the unheimlich, that is to say, the sensation of

de-familiarization within the context of the familiar. In this sense, Kristeva states: Instead of

sounding himself as to his being, he does so concerning his place: Where am I? instead of

Who am I? For the space that engrosses the deject, the excluded, is never one, nor

homogenous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic. (235).

Therefore, faced with the Where am I? question of the here/there intersection, Junot Daz

expressed the following in an interview: I always lived in a situation of simultaneity. Its like a

science fiction book where an alien or creature or an artifact exists on two worlds, or on two

different planes at one time. Theyre not fixed in one place. They phase in and out. (Lewis). It is

7Dirty realism as a form of primitivism constitutes a space assigned to the Third World in the literature about theOther at the same time that it expresses the ideology of canon-forming publishing companies in the assignment of a

place to the literatures produced by the Other-Within in a process of postcolonial Other-ification on the part of themetropolis. According to Pascale Casanova, the literature of each region or country would have an assigned space inthe Republic of Letters. The space of Dominican-American letters is exoticism, tropicalism, and the modalities of

primitivism like abjection and dirty realism.

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not a coincidence that Daz uses the word alien, a word that in English designates both the

foreigner and the extraterrestrial.

In the majority of Dazs stories, the main characters, Yunior and Rafa, and the other

characters as well, live in the countryside and/or in marginal neighborhoods both in the

Dominican Republic, and New York City. These spaces are represented as sordid, dirty, and

abject, where fights and beatings are staged or where the characters psychologically torture each

other. The heartbreak of familial separation is represented as well: the resentment of children

abandoned in the country or in a marginal neighborhood in the Dominican Republic.

In Ysrael, the two brothers, on vacation near Ocoa, in an environment of abjection andpoverty, torture a boy who uses a mask to hide a facial deformity. Like in the story Face, the

absence of a face -like the dolls sold in Dominican markets-represents the search for identity.

Rafa, the older brother, treats Ysrael brutally and kicks him, strikes him on the head with a

bottle, and succeed in unmasking him in order to verify the true face of this Dominican boy. If

Ysrael does not have a white mask, using Fanons metaphor, in order to hide the color of his

skin, at least he wishes to hide that face deformed by poverty and abjection, a face that will be

substituted with another mask, the Anglo one, as a result of the plastic surgery he will one day

undergo in the United States.

The Impossibility of Return

Iain Chambers considers that return is impossible, but I suspect that it is a not a question

of a physical return, but of a psychological one. Yo, as well as Soledad and Yunior, return to the

Dominican Republic. However, this return, as a return to the seed, inverts the here/now and

there/then antitheses, which implies that they have not freed themselves from them, because the

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same discontinuity persists (Una distancia entre dos momentos (Trigo, 2000, 279)), a

discontinuity installed in them upon leaving the country for the first time.

With respect to the impossibility of return, Chambers states the following:

Migrancy, on the contrary, involves a movement in which neither the points ofdeparture nor those of arrival are immutable or certain. It calls for a dwelling inlanguage, in histories, in identities that are constantly subject to mutation. Always intransit, the promise of a homecoming -completing the story, domesticating the detour-becomes an impossibility. (5)

In Yo!, Soledadand The Sun, the Moon and the Stars, the return would seem to close a cycle,

but this return is only the return to a contra-nostalgia which forms part of the ambivalence in

which the characters find themselves trapped.

At the end of Soledadby Angie Cruz, the character of the same name returns to Pltano

Land, a pejorative name with which the characters rechristen the Dominican Republic, in order

to get to know the place that her grandmother, her mother and her aunt called home. Soledad

goes with her cousins to visit Las Tres Bocas (Los Tres Ojos?), some caves filled with seawater.

The entrance into the cave, into the water, is the return to the womb and the amniotic fluid:

And when I surrender to the warmth of the water, I feel the past, present andfuture become one. My mother becomes the ocean and the sky. . . Her eyes stareat me and I can hear the high pitch of my mothers voice. . . When I open myeyes, my mother is holding me, my head on her lap, her hands combing throughmy hair (Cruz, 2001, 236-37).

As can be seen in this quote, return is only possible through the womb (regression) symbolized

by the cave Soledad penetrates.

Symptomatically, in the story The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars by Junot Daz, Yunior

travels to another cavern, the Cave of the Jaguar, considered by another character to be the

birthplace of the nation. (Daz, 1998, 71). In his descent to the cave, Yunior experiences fear

and begins to shout for help, making the others pull him out. For his apparent cowardice, Yunior

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is called pussy by the other characters. For Jacqueline Loss, cowardice and the fact of having

been called pussy constitute the proof that this story ridicules the universal search for truth

and originality and the construction of national foundations on the basis of an obscure descent.

(Ibid., 812). Totally on the contrary, the mention of the vagina by a character during the descent

is nothing more than fear of the return to the womb and to the nation, a return to the known

which is also unknown, the unheimlich, the return to . . . the hole [which] is blacker than any of

us. (Ibid., 71)

The Master/Slave Dialectic: the Search for Recognition

In his book Undoing Empire, Jos Buscaglia-Salgado analyzes the discursive

complexities of the creole and the mulatto in the New World, as a retort to the European Ideal

which tried to exclude them. According to Buscaglia, Sigenza y Gngora was a typical creole,

spending his entire life in search of recognition, honor, and legitimacy at all costs. (137). The

phenomenon of the search for legitimization on the part of creole intellectuals during the colonial

era can be extrapolated to Latino intellectuals and writers currently living in the United States.

In the case of Dominican-American writers, the appropriation of the primitivist discourse

and abjection by means of dirty realism with respect to the subaltern Other constructs them as

a hegemonic subject, at the same time that they seek legitimization on the part of the Anglo

subject. They do this by appropriating the language of the hegemonic subject, surpassing him in

the mastery of the language -all of them write in English- as well as also obtaining literary prizes

and publications in the publishing companies of the hegemonic centers.

In his story The Sun, the Moon, the Stars, Yunior expresses the following with respect

to his friend: You never met more opposite niggers in your life. . . (What is it with us niggers

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and our bodies? Not even Fanon can explain it to me. (Daz, 1998, 106). And it is precisely

Frantz Fanon who can shed light not only the subject of racism but on the psychological

pathologies of the colonized subject as well. In Black Skin/White Masks, Fanon states:

Every colonized people -in other words, every people in whose soul andinferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local culturaloriginality- finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; thatis, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above hisjungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother countrys culturalstandards. He becomes writer as he renounces his blackness, his jungle. (18)

It would be necessary to make a few adjustments to this forceful affirmation in order to apply itto Dominican-American writers. First, although the United States is not the mother country of

these writers, this country has come to displace/substitute Europe in terms of its political and

cultural hegemony in Latin America. Second, these writers are mestizo, but as Hispanics, trapped

in the American racial polarization, they would be considered black, not Anglo. And third, as

Bhabha comments in his introduction, Fanon uses the word man and the masculine pronoun to

refer to humanity, which leaves the complications of gender completely aside. The majority of

Dominican-American writers are women, and so their representation of their home countrys

culture necessarily includes a criticism of patriarchy. Even so, a representation of what

Chambers calls the violence of alterity is not included in the representation of Anglo men,

because in this case it would be a double violence of alterity, because as women they have to

confront not only the patriarchal culture of the United States, but racial and cultural domination

as well. Therefore, male and female writers appropriate the white mask, which as a phallocentric

Anglo discourse is a double mask: white and male.

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In his introduction to Fanons book, Bhabha states that difference -in this case cultural as

well as gender-based- is erased with the colonizers invitation when he says: Youre a doctor, a

writer, a student, youre different, youre one of us. It is precisely in that ambivalent use of

different -to be different from those who are different makes you the same- that the

unconscious speaks of the form of Otherness. . . (1986, xvi). Upon the erasure of ethno-racial

difference, Dominican-American writers construct themselves as hegemonic once they are

recognized as equals.

With respect to the people of the Caribbean, Fanon is more specific when he writes:

Everything an Antillean does is done for the Other. . . The Other who corroborates him in hissearch for self-validation. (212-13). On the one hand, Dominican-American writers seek and

need the recognition of the hegemonic subject -white European- in order to construct their

humanity (Fanon, 1967, 216-17). This search is translated into desire and identification with the

hegemonic subject whom they consider superior. On the other, the hegemonic subject legitimizes

the self-valorization of the postcolonial subject. The white subject (European or American) then

becomes the expert who will determine the value of the work of art and will put a price on it,

through publication in prestigious publishing companies and literary prizes in the hegemonic

centers.

Fanon analyzes the master/slave dialectic in which Hegel proposes that the necessity of

recognition is reciprocal, that both the master and the slave need mutual recognition for their

existence (Ibid., 220). These master/slave relations are translated within the frame of the

postcolonial relationship between the United States and Latin America as desire: As soon as I

desire I am asking to be considered (Ibid., 218). If it is certain that the Dominican-American

writer desires the Anglo subject and seeks his recognition, the Anglo subject also needs to be

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desired and recognized as lord and master, as superior, an owner of the language. This

recognition is only possible as far as the authors language approaches that of the masters and as

the topics in question include the representation of some significant aspect of the dominant

culture and the depreciation of the home countrys culture.

Conclusion

The privileged place that Homi Bhabha and Gustavo Prez-Firmat give to the concepts of

third space and hyphen culture, respectively, with respect to the hybrid fails insofar that the

hybrid lives out a doubly marginal condition unless he renounces his original culture and notonly assimilates to the host culture but surpasses the host in skillful mastery of the language.

Only in this way can he achieve the hegemonic subjects recognition. The characters Yo and

Soledad are two examples of how, although in permanent struggle with the family which

represents Dominican culture, one has become a successful writer and the other an employee in

an art gallery in an Anglo neighborhood of New York. In the same way, Yunior, the narrative

alter ego of Junot Daz in the story The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao goes to college and

succeeds in overcoming the abjection of the spaces of social marginalization, becoming only a

witness of them. At the same time, he becomes the narrator of Oscar Waos vicissitudes in the

Dominican Republic, which end in Oscars death at the hands of a soldier, which proves that

return is ultimately impossible.

The process of assimilation/resistance in the hybrid is not void of anguish, anxiety, and

fear, faced with the pressure to assimilate to the host countrys culture. In a 1997 interview with

Heather Rosario-Sievert in Review: Latin American Literature and Arts, Julia lvarez, with

regard to the collisions between the two cultures, said, It creates confusion and conflicts that get

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worked into the writing, but my eyes see certain things because I am that mixture. (36). Thus,

even though she sees her hybridity as a source of conflict, she also believes, like the cultural

theorist Homi Bhabha, that the third space created by this hybridity is a privileged one, in that it

allows her to change positions as subject. lvarez appears to have overcome these cultural

conflicts by following the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz in choosing language -although I would

rather say writing- over culture, as her place of residence. Also, Junot Daz seems to agree with

this position when he says in an interview: I always lived in a situation of simultaneity

(Lewis). But in the story The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Yvon, Oscars girlfriend,

tells him: A person cant have two [homes]. (Daz, 2001, 116). So, one cannot dwell in twolanguages, because even if residence in a second language can free one from the prison of the

mother tongue, language does not merely reflect culture, history and differences but also

produces them. (Chambers, 1994, 12). The balance of life in the hyphen, of life in the in-

between, is broken and the scale tilts toward the hegemonic language and culture. In this way,

Homi Bhabhas neither the one nor the other becomes rather one more than the other.

Translated by Scott Cooper

References

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___________. 1994b.In the Time of the Butterflies. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books.

___________. 1997. Yo!New York: Plume.___________. 2000.In the Name of Salom. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books.Bhabha, Homi. 1988 The Commitment to Theory.New Formations4: 5-23.

____________. Foreword. 1986.Black Skin/White Masks. London: Pluto Press. vii-xv.Buscaglia-Salgado, Jos F. 2003. Undoing Empire: Race and Nation in the Mulatto

Caribbean.Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Casanova, Pascale. 2004. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge, Massachusetts:

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_________. 1998. The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars.New Yorker, February 2, 66-71._________. 2000-2001. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.New Yorker,

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